[bsvalley]

I burnt out on coding a few years ago because of the painful development process in a professional environment. Dead lines, boring work, bug fixes, politics, micro management, etc. Here is exactly what I did:

1. I quit my full time job (I was working at a FAANG), took a 2 month break in order to travel, work out etc, then I started working on my own projects. I was coding from 7am to 1am from Monday to Sunday, 6 months in a row. This doesn't include coding only, I also worked on UX, marketing, legal, anything involved in building a product from scratch. I enjoyed every minute of it and learned so much...

2. This got me into Product Management. I started focusing on product management only and started bootstrapping the whole thing to iterate on more ideas. It ended up not working so well so I started applying for PM roles. I got some opportunities here and there but they weren't as good as I wanted. Being a Tech lead having to start at the bottom of the PM chain. It felt like I was over qualified for an entry level role and would not get qualified for a Senior PM role because of a lack of "PM" experience.

3. So I went back to coding for a large company as a lead.

4. Quickly transitioned into Management and moved away from coding again.

There you have it. Coding became a second nature but I can't be as productive as I used to be in the past. So why would I try to compete against young and fresh people? I found out I was more valuable in designing systems, optimizing existing infrastructures, asking questions young engineers don't really think about because of a lack of experience. The act of coding per-se isn't for me anymore. That's it. There are many ways to move away from coding without losing all your valuable years of experience.